Nvidia Locks 30 Billion in OpenAI, 100 Billion Partnership Falls Through, Jensen Huang: No More Investing

TradingKey - On March 4 local time, NVIDIA ( NVDA) CEO Jensen Huang clearly stated at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference that the company's recent $30 billion investment in OpenAI will likely be its final equity investment in the firm, while explicitly ruling out the possibility of the previously proposed $100 billion investment plan coming to fruition.

Huang noted that OpenAI is expected to launch an IPO by the end of 2026, which would effectively close the window for large-scale equity investments between the two parties.

He mentioned, "I don't think an opportunity to invest $100 billion in OpenAI will present itself again. So this may be our last chance to invest in a company of such significant importance."

Huang also revealed that NVIDIA's $10 billion investment in OpenAI rival Anthropic is likely to be its last as well.

NVIDIA and OpenAI: $100 Billion Partnership Scuttled

The vision for a large-scale investment partnership between NVIDIA and OpenAI first began last September, when the two parties announced an agreement for NVIDIA to provide ongoing capital injections as OpenAI built out new supercomputing facilities in phases, with a cumulative cap of up to $100 billion. The news drew widespread attention in the tech industry and led to a series of subsequent infrastructure cooperation agreements.

However, just two months later, NVIDIA first warned in its November quarterly report that the $100 billion deal was at risk of falling through. In January this year, reports surfaced that the agreement had been "put on hold," and NVIDIA warned again in its February quarterly report using similar language, stating explicitly that there was "no assurance" it could reach an investment partnership agreement with OpenAI or successfully complete the transaction.

Ultimately, NVIDIA's contribution to OpenAI was finalized at $30 billion. Although the scale is significantly lower than originally envisioned, it still sets a record for the company's largest single investment in a single startup.

This capital is part of the $110 billion funding round announced by OpenAI last month, which also included investments from Amazon ( AMZN) for $50 billion and SoftBank for $30 billion, pushing OpenAI's valuation to $730 billion.

Unlike previous arrangements for phased capital injections based on the progress of supercomputing facility deployment, this $30 billion investment does not have any milestone-linked conditions. As part of the agreement's terms, OpenAI has secured 3 GW of dedicated inference capacity and 2 GW of training capacity from NVIDIA's Vera Rubin system for the operation of its AI data centers.

The Rise and Grand Blueprint of OpenAI

Founded in 2015, OpenAI initially started as a non-profit organization. It released the GPT-2 model in 2019, and the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 completely ignited a global AI craze, becoming the fastest consumer application to reach 100 million users in history.

Within just two months of its launch, ChatGPT's monthly visits exceeded 670 million, placing it among the top 50 most visited websites globally, and OpenAI subsequently became the most sought-after startup in the AI field.

As the willingness of enterprise customers to pay for the GPT series models and their associated development tools continues to rise, OpenAI's revenue structure has become increasingly solid.

According to the latest data disclosed by The Information, as of the end of February 2026, OpenAI's annualized revenue has surpassed the $25 billion mark. Compared to a revenue scale of $21.4 billion at the end of 2025, the company achieved approximately 17% growth in just two months, fully demonstrating its leading position and expansion momentum in the global AI commercialization wave.

However, OpenAI is not the sole dominant player in the enterprise AI market; it faces competition from startups like Anthropic, which focus on large model R&D, and must also engage in head-to-head confrontations with tech giants like Google ( GOOGL )—the latter of which is also accelerating the provision of AI infrastructure and model services to enterprise customers.

To support growing computing power demands and R&D investment, OpenAI has set an ambitious internal long-term development goal: to achieve an annualized revenue of $280 billion by 2030.

But behind this goal is a massive capital investment; it is estimated that by 2030, the company's cumulative investment in computing infrastructure will reach $665 billion. This also explains why OpenAI has recently been actively pursuing a new funding round of approximately $110 billion to secure the capital needed for its long-term development.